In this exercise we're going to take this very cool foreground image, and whenI say cool I mean it has a cool color scheme going on with lot of Blues andcool Greens and Violets and so on. We're going to attempt to make it match thisvery warm background so that she appears to be right at home inside of her newenvironment. We're going to be trying to pull this off using the Match Colorcommand, the Hue/Saturation command and Levels, all working together.So I am working inside of an image called Cool meets Warm.psd. That's foundinside of the 10_advanced_blend folder. If you want to catch on up with me, youcan open this document as well. Make sure that the top layer is selected, andfor what it's worth, the name of this layer is young lady, as you can see here.

Make sure that she is selected and that the full color version of the image,not the mask, is active. So I just go ahead and click on that thumbnail, if youwill, just to make sure. Now I am going to Shift+Tab away my palette so I havea little more room to work. I am also going to switch to the Full Screen mode.So that I can move her off to the side while I bring up my whopping big dialog boxes here.The first command that we're going to apply is this one right there, Image >Adjustments > Match Color, a very powerful command that is totally organized inthe most bizarre fashion possible. But it's a very good command actually; atleast what it does is good. I do have some issues with it though, as you'llsee, ever so shortly. So go ahead and choose Match Color.

Basically the big issue I have with this command or is two, really. One is,that the whole darn things organize upside down. The most important options aredown here at the bottom and then you've got to work your way up. Secondly,everything is turned off, by default. The default settings are do nothing, donothing, do nothing as we'll see. The very first thing you have to do is changethe Source. By default, it set to None.You can't do anything inside this dialog box with Source set to None. So goahead and switch it from None to the name of the active image, the one that youare working in, which might be Background blur if you've been working rightalong with me. Or if you just opened this image, its Cool meets warm.psd. So Iam going to go ahead and choose that one. Even still, Photoshop doesn't do anything.

It decides in its infinite wisdom here, that it should take the young ladylayer, that we're working on right now, and match it to the young lady layer,which is matching the image to itself, which isn't going to do us any good.Obviously, that's not going to result in any kind of change. So we need tochange Layer Option from young lady to Background.As soon as we choose this option, bingo; We start to get results. You can seethat the Match Color command is a heck of a job of matching the colors in theforeground image to the colors in the background image at this point, almosttoo good of a job, I would say. That's where this Fade value, right here, comesinto play. By default, Fade is set to zero, meaning that we are seeing theMatch Color command at full volume, essentially.

If we want to turn it down so that we don't have any color matching going on,we would set Fade down to a 100%. Anything in between, sort of mixes theoriginal version of the image with the Match Color version. I am going to goahead and air on the side of the original colors a little bit by changing theFade value to 60%, as we are seeing here. And yet we are still getting a heckof a lot of color matching going on.So she looks quite transformed. Go ahead and click OK in order to accept thesevalues. We don't need to worry about Luminance, Color Intensity or any of theothers. This is just fine. So go ahead and click OK. That's step number one.

Step number two is, we need to address the coolness of the lighting that'sapplied to our eyes right there and to her dress as well. I think her dressjust looks too magenta for this new background. So I am going to deselect theimage, and this time I am going to use the Hue/Saturation command, which allowsus to adjust specific hue ranges at a time.So I am going to go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments and choose thisguy right there, Hue/Saturation or you can press the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Uon the PC, Command+U on the Mac. It brings up the Hue/Saturation dialog box.

Now when Edit is set to Master, you are going to end up adjusting all of thecolors at a time. And we don't want to do that. So go ahead and reset that Huevalue, in my case, back to zero.Instead, we want to adjust one color range independently of the other colorranges. As long as you don't have this set to Master, you can select anythingyou want. In other words, you could either say, gosh! I think those colorsinside of her eyes are currently Cyans, or you could say, God, I don't knowwhat they are, I'll just choose Reds. It doesn't matter, because notice even ifI say Reds, which is obviously not right.If I then move my Eyedropper into the image like so and I click, then Photoshopis going to say, that wasn't Reds, that's something else. In this case, itdecided that it was Greens. Then if I Shift+Drag inside of the eyes a littlebit and I'll Shift+Drag inside of this eye as well or Shift+Click, and we arebasically lifting colors just as we would lift colors inside the Color Range dialog box.

Then Photoshop is going to update on the fly. It may decide ultimately that youare working with Cyans or it may like it is for me just stubbornly say, no youare working with Greens. You can adjust that as well. If you look down here onthe color bar, you'll see that it has selected this big range of colors goingfrom yellow right here. So look at the straight bars, all the way from yellowwrapping around through cyans and back to roughly cobalt, let's say.The triangles represents the fuzziness, the soft drop-off of the color toensure that we don't have jagged edges. Well, let's say I want to take theGreens out of the equation, because I don't know what it's doing, telling meit's Greens. I don't want to change a bunch of Yellows and Greens inside ofthis image. So I just go ahead and drag this light gray area right there overto the right hand side and I'll go ahead and release.

Notice as soon as I start getting into the cyan region, it now reflects thatchange and it says, okay, you're working with Cyans, fine. Now then, in orderto get rid of the color inside of the eyes, I am going to reduce the Saturationvalue down to -100 and that is going to make the Whites of the eyes neutral. SoI am just trying to change the Whites of the eyes, I don't want to change thirises, I don't want to change this fleshy portion of the eyes either.Next, let's change her dress. I am going to go ahead and select a differentEdit range, just to establish that we want to work with a different range. Youcan work with as many as six different ranges inside the image. Notice thereare my Cyans, what were formally called Cyans inside the image are now calledCyans 2, but we're not doing anything with that bank of colors.

This time, I am just going to switch to Magentas because I know it is Magentas.Go ahead and switch to that option and then I'll click inside the dress just toestablish that it's a base color and I'll Shift+Drag a little bit through thedress in order to grab some other colors as well.Now I am going to increase the Hue value to 35 so I am rotating the Hue 35degrees around the big color wheel. You can see here, I am going to go and zoomin on the dress. You can see that I am really changing too many colors in thedress, because not only am I changing the Magenta areas, but I am also changingthese reds inside of the dress to more of like flesh tones and I don't wantthat, because for one thing they start to look like holes in the dress. Also,they just look out of keeping with the rest of the image.

So let's go ahead and drag back on this gray area right there, this light grayarea in order to move the colors back over, so that we're constraining thisrange of colors that we're changing. Ultimately, you'll start to see those sortof orange areas drop out of the dress. I might go ahead and expand the dressthis direction a little bit as well, just to make sure that we have more thenenough color selected.This looks great to me. So I am going to go ahead and click OK in order toaccept that modification and just so we can see what we were able to accomplishhere, it's pretty subtle, but this is before, watch the eyes and the dress ifyou can, even though they're on opposite sides of the image. This is before, soyou can see that the eyes look pretty darn blue than whites of the eyes do, andthe dress looks like a very hot magenta color.

This is after, the dress now is more of a toned down rose color and the eyesare neutral. Let's zoom out again. One more thing that we need to do. We needto increase the contrast of this image, because it's too low contrast,especially for the foreground shot here. So I am going to go up to the Imagemenu. I am going to choose Adjustments and I am going to choose the Levelscommand. Or of course, I could press Ctrl+L or Command+L on the Mac as we haveso many times before.Notice that we don't have a heck of a lot of very hot highlights inside of thisimage, so the Histogram falls off early on the right hand side. It begins lateover here on the left hand side. So our shadows could stand a little darkeningas well. So I am going to take that black point up to 5, like so, and you cansee that really makes for some richer shadows inside of the image.

I am going to take the white point down to 235 in order to increase thehighlights. And just for good measure I am going to raise that gamma value byselecting the value and pressing the Up Arrow key four times in order toincrease that value to 1.04 and then I am going to click OK.That is the final version of the image that is the modified version of thecolors inside of the image. Just to give you a sense of how far we've come,this is the before version, a very cool version of this young women. This isthe after version where she much better matches her environment, I think.

She has still got some problems where the edges are concerned, because she hasa ton of light edges tracing around her hair and her shoulders and so on. Weare going to start to address those problems using blending, of course, in the next exercise.

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Released

11/21/2007

The elusive alpha channel remains one of the most misunderstood yet powerful tools in Photoshop. Alpha channels are collections of luminance data that control the transparency of an image, and they inform just about every aspect of Photoshop. As he builds transitional blended layers, fashions a depth map, makes edge adjustments, and takes on extreme channel mixing, Omni Award-winning expert Deke McClelland teaches Photoshop users that where there's a will, there's a way. Photoshop CS3 Channels and Masks: Advanced Techniques covers mapping texture on an image, turning flesh into stone, using vector masks, working with all different channels, creating a rustic edge effect, and much more. Exercise files accompany the tutorials.